| By :
Dirik Hameed
Today a celebrity speaker is akin to specialists on pro sports teams such as relief pitchers. At the end of the game, with the game on the line, the team hands the ball, or the microphone, to the lone figure whose job is to close it out successfully. After the speaker makes the crowd laugh, or get inspired, or feel the presence of stardom, he or she can start counting the money. There's so much money in this now that providing celebrity speakers for various kinds of gathering has become a kind of business unto itself. Visit their sites and they'll have photos and mini-biographies of dozens of them. Generally, the speakers will be arranged by type for your convenience. The fees such speakers command isn't pocket change. A starlet on a new television comedy that isn't a hit yet, but about which great things are expected, could cost between $5,000 and $10,000, or more if she is the survivor of a meth addiction and can be packaged as an "inspirational speaker". A solid professional football player might also fall into that pay range, as might a NASA astronaut who flew on the Space Shuttle. Your organization might need to spend between $30,000 and $50,000 for a famous industrialist, or for the star of an old, long-syndicated iconic TV series. At the high end of the price scale comes a certain ex-President of the United States, with a fee of $500,000 or more to grace your event and reminisce. It's well worth asking whether it's worth it. In some cases, this can be calculated. If you happen to be a charity raising money to support teenage unwed mothers, you have can simply measure whether twenty thousand dollars to a celebrity who was once an unwed teen mother is worth it. The question would be whether that much more money arrived in donations or not. If it didn't, the organization just wasted a lot of money. If it did, that was good advertising. Whenever the event is meant to turn a profit, it is capable of such a judgement. If you're holding a baseball collectibles convention, it's easy to determine if it was worth it to pay $100,000 to a three-time MVP when you might've landed last year's batting champ for half that amount. By contrast, it's hard to determine value if the event doesn't have a goal that can be measured in income. That should be a concern, because speakers expect payment in something a lot more fungible than prestige. Every university graduation ceremony features a celebrity speaker, and the most predictable thing the speaker will not is that the speech will be remembered by absolutely no one within a month. Perhaps the time has come to remember this part, at least, of all those forgotten speeches, and incorporate it as a factor when drawing up the budget for next year's speech. It might at least relieve the graduates of some portion of their debt. A conference of businessmen might reconsider the expensive pharmaceuticals CEO whose face graces magazine covers. The mid-level R & D scientist who led the team that designed the breakthrough vaccine might be more inspirational even if he doesn't speak as well. The time might have come to cut down on costs by broadening the field of celebrity speakers.
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